Author: SceneByGreen

The Holdovers (2023)

Alexander Payne | 2hr 13min

The students and teachers of all-boys boarding school Barton Academy have no issue letting Mr Paul Hunham know that he is by far the least liked member of staff. He is a hardline traditionalist who rarely gives high grades, refuses to let his class off early on the last day of semester, and freely dishes out creative insults with unfettered bluntness. Quite understandably, those few students who won’t be returning home for the Christmas break are dreading spending it with him instead. Even outside of school term, he continues to impose study and exercise schedules, and rules over their downtime with unwavering rigidity.

It is through the warm, festive magic of The Holdovers though that Paul crucially separates himself from the hostile teachers of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Breakfast Club. Alexander Payne instils his protagonist with an amiable sincerity that is scarce to be found in so many contemporary films, using both style and narrative to call back to the cinema of the era that these characters are living through. Just as America was caught between its mid-century innocence and a horrific grappling with the Vietnam War in the 1970s, so too are the teenagers of Barton coming to grips with a harsher world than they once believed, making for a coming-of-age film that unites generations in common emotional struggles.

More specifically, it is the comedy-dramas of Hal Ashby that inspire Payne’s direction in The Holdovers, many of which were in conversation with the decade’s political issues. The relationship that forms between Angus and Paul obviously lacks the romance of Harold and Maude, and yet the bond they form similarly transcends a significant age gap, while the appearance of Cat Stevens’ song ‘The Wind’ within the 70s pop soundtrack draws the connection even deeper. The long dissolves that link scenes in their unauthorised excursion to Boston also recall the snowy, cross-state road trip of The Last Detail, blending frozen landscapes and close-ups in transitions that thoughtfully evoke a distinct time and place in American history.

The film grain that Payne emulates in his digital cinematography takes the nostalgia of 70s cinema a step further, but more than anything else it is the complex character work which richly embodies the decade’s counterculture. Most of the boys’ parents are relegated to minor roles here, setting off on winter vacations that leave their children emotionally isolated over the Christmas break and struggling to find any meaning in the holiday season. Angus’ relationships with his mother, father, and stepfather are particularly delicate, forcing him to shield a raw, wounded heart behind layers of white lies.

That his cantankerous classics teacher turns out to be the most well-equipped adult in his life to nurse those afflictions comes as a surprise to Angus, and perhaps even more so to Paul himself. He too has learned to hide his insecurities, though his defence mechanism manifests as a front of cerebral confidence, awkwardly inserting ancient historical facts into conversation and even outright lying to an old college classmate about his academic career. It is the small details of Paul Giamatti’s performance that develop this professor into such a nuanced portrait of middle-aged loneliness, from the lazy eye that keeps others guessing which one to look at, to the shyness around women that hints at a life of celibacy. Should he let the air of intellectual authority disappear for even a second, then he might just be exposed as a social outcast whose entire self-worth rests on his job.

If there is anyone worth opening up to though, it is Angus. While they are trapped inside the school alone with head cook Mary Lamb, they slowly drive each other insane, and Payne delights in the gags that ensue from their rivalry. The rapport that all three build over time is carefully earned, even if the time stamps which mark the passing days are formally weakened by their relatively quick drop-off. This is a film of small moments of connection, transforming forced obligations into genuine desires to fill the voids in each other’s lives. For Angus and Paul, this takes the form of a father-son relationship, while for Mary it is the loss of her child in the Vietnam War that keeps her grieving at work over the Christmas break, and which sees her subconsciously take on a maternal role in this surrogate family of outsiders.

Payne’s comedy is rarely extraneous to these relationships, but often serves to bring these characters together in moments of levity or, at the very least, high-pressure situations that they might look back on with humour. Driven to rebel out of sheer frustration, Angus taunts Paul with a forced chase through the school hallways, but ultimately fails to subvert the power structure when he dislocates his shoulder. Angus’ decision to take the blame for the incident and save his teacher is more than just a step towards reconciliation for them – it is paid back in full by Paul at a critical point in his own character arc, sacrificing his ego and rigid principles for his student’s future. It is not by discipline, but rather through compassion and mercy that he makes the biggest impact of his teaching career, without ever losing that sardonic wit that gives Payne’s festive film its amusingly cynical edge. By the end, it is almost impossible not to give into the effortless, authentic charm of The Holdovers, as Paul, Angus, and Mary transform what so many consider the loneliest holiday of the year into a season warmly dedicated to its most distant outcasts.

The Holdovers is currently playing in cinemas.

Tom Jones (1963)

Tony Richardson | 2hr 1min

When Henry Fielding wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in 1749, he carved a powerful archetype out of its adolescent hero, leading him through worldly adventures that taught him lessons of moral integrity, courage, and independence. The transition from youth to maturity had been explored in the mythology of many ancient cultures before, but this was a coming-of-age story for a modern world, daring to treat its protagonist’s journey with a good dose of wit, irony, and moral complexity.

What Tony Richardson accomplished in his 1963 adaptation Tom Jones is more than just an update, though his version of the titular character is certainly far more an icon of the Swinging Sixties than the 18th century, complete with the floppy hair and roguish charm of The Beatles. Richardson’s reinvention is imbued with the rebellious spirit of Tom Jones himself, throwing out the playbook of artistic convention to challenge the same conservative notions of young adulthood that Fielding had satirised over two hundred years prior.

Albert Finney gives the performance of his career as Tom Jones – he is a modern man of the 1960s living in the 18th century, roguishly charming and gleefully adventurous.

As a landmark of the British New Wave, Tom Jones naturally carries the influence of its parallel French movement, and specifically the light formal experimentations of François Truffaut whose literary adaptations were similarly adventurous. Freeze frames, jump cuts, and fourth wall breaks constantly disrupt the narrative’s natural flow with comical disregard, and almost every scene transition is marked by an iris closing in on a face, a dissolve, or a wipe taking any number of shapes. Given the number of amateurs who have adopted these techniques in cheap editing programs, it is hard to argue that this has had a particularly positive influence overall, and as a result many have labelled Richardson’s editing as clumsy. Within the context of his caustic, irreverent satire though, these creative choices brilliantly undercut the pretentiousness of Tom Jones’ snobbish aristocratic society with amusing derision, reducing their self-important lives to colourful entertainment for the masses.

Richardson freezes the frame at pivotal moments, playing with our expectations and the continuity of the piece itself.
Richardson approaches his edit with a rebellious French New Wave attitude about him, breaking up the edit with a freeze frame montage of character poses.

In fact, it isn’t hard to imagine Stanley Kubrick taking much of Richardson’s work here as his inspiration for Barry Lyndon twelve years later, subverting traditional notions of literary and historical study by underscoring the absolute absurdity of his characters. As if spoken by tedious college professors, the voiceovers of both films narrate their respective stories with haughty arrogance, weaving long-winded turns of phrase into their speech that make them targets of the viewer’s contempt. Especially in Tom Jones, our narrator humorously takes it on himself to decide which parts of the tale should be concealed from public view, as the camera gently drifts away from the beginning of a sex scene between Tom and Molly, a local peasant girl.

“It shall be our custom to leave such scenes where taste, decorum, and the censor dictate.”

Scene transitions creatively unfold in irises…
Long dissolves…
…and screen wipes taking any number of shapes, exaggerating the film style in a way that supports its formal experimentations.

Humans are inherently crude, messy creatures, so Richardson holds much criticism for those who try to apply a false filter of sophistication to modern understandings of their own species. This applies just as much to storytellers as it does to those characters arrogantly trying to write their own artificial legacies, many of whom happen to belong to society’s upper class. Tom is at least honest with his imperfections, while the noblemen who surround him ludicrously frame their vicious hunts for wild game and their vain gloating over dead carcasses as honourable sport. Richardson’s cinematography doesn’t touch the profound beauty of Barry Lyndon, but his active camera is fully engaged with the action as it races alongside their horses during the chase, unashamedly submitting to the thrill of their bloodthirsty conquest and carrying the energy of its vigorous editing. In calmer scenes, he mounts his period production design and blocking in handsome wide shots too, maintaining the same sophisticated, stuffy affect as his ensemble of pompous Englishmen.

There are no long takes to be found, but the camera is frequently dynamic and moving with characters.
Tom Jones is not an overly beautiful film, but it has superb visual moments like these, setting a wall of white flowers as a scene backdrop.
Scenic backgrounds and period costuming when Tom sets out on his journey through the countrysides of 18th century England.
It’s not quite Barry Lyndon, but Richardson does make the time for painterly moments of blocking and lighting.

Of all these characters, it is Mr. Blifil who is clearly the most contemptuous, asserting his noble heritage over his baseborn cousin Tom who was adopted by the kind-hearted Squire Allworthy. This villain represents everything distasteful about England’s aristocracy, pursuing Tom’s love interest Sophie with an air of vain entitlement, and later having him banished from the estate out of pure envy. This exile consequently becomes the catalyst for our hero’s journey of self-discovery, revealing his chivalry when he saves a woman being assaulted, and his recklessness when he is drawn too easily into physical confrontations. The fact that Richardson also dwells on the awkwardness of his romantic encounters between these major encounters is integral to this character study as well, watching him lustily biting into chicken to clumsily entice a woman who he later discovers may or may not be his birth mother, while she in turn seductively slurps up an oyster.

Comic brilliance in the culinary seduction scene between Tom and Mrs Waters who dig into their meals with exaggerated sensuality.

The question of Tom’s true parentage may hang heavy over the narrative, but in moments like these it is treated with as much irreverent humour as anything else. The possibility that he has committed incest makes for a shockingly amusing subplot, and the opening scene which sees him abandoned as a baby in Squire Allworthy’s quarters is especially whimsical, playing out in the farcically exaggerated fashion of a silent film. The traditionally baroque harpsichord is appropriated into an upbeat screwball score here while confusion hysterically runs riot through the squire’s estate, upending formal convention several years before Monty Python would do the same in their historical comedies. When the identity of Tom’s parents is finally revealed in Tom Jones’ final act, Richardson doesn’t waste time contemplating the laborious details of the tell-all letter either, but rather rushes through the exposition with a rapid-fire, fourth wall-breaking monologue that economically cuts straight to the point.

A silent film opening whimsically sets up the mystery of Tom’s birth in a throwback to cinema’s past.
Fourth wall breaks speed through necessary but cumbersome exposition with enormous energy, cutting straight to the point.

To Richardson, continuity is little more than a hindrance to his fusion of highbrow social satire and lowbrow slapstick. It is a tool for snobs, feebly demanding respect while inviting the playful mockery of others. The abundance of irony in Tom Jones is not to say that it lacks sincerity, as behind Albert Finney’s toothy grin and comic talents we still find a young man resolutely making his way through the world, though it is consistently his light-hearted nature which guides his moral character. Tom is no relic of the 18th century or even the 1960s in Richardson’s hands, but an emblem of perennial youth, finding comfort in the frivolous joys and contrivances of an exceedingly absurd world.

Tom Jones is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to buy on Amazon.

Teorema (1968)

Pier Paolo Pasolini | 1hr 38min

Though Pier Paolo Pasolini imbues Teorema’s structure with the same rigidity as the bourgeoisie’s arbitrary social conventions, his fleeting cutaways to Mt Etna’s chaotic, elemental landscapes are never far away. The volcano is a natural catalyst of transformation and destruction, with its fissures blowing sulphurous steam across slopes of black dust and threatening to erase any semblance of social order within its reach. It wreaks turmoil and madness, both predating and outlasting the entire span of time that humans have lived on Earth. When a mortal being truly grasps a force as primordially unfathomable as this, the effects are wildly unpredictable, though the entropic family portrait that Pasolini paints here captures the complexity of such a world-shifting spiritual experience with mystifying acuity.

The barren, steamy landscapes of Mt Etna make for inspired formal cutaways, punctuating this rigorously structured film with visions of wild chaos.
Sunlight accompanies the Visitor in divine lens flares, framing him like a Renaissance sculpture.

In the case of Teorema’s lonely aristocrats, it is not the secrets of God’s earthly creation which they must grapple with, but rather a mysterious figure who seems to come from another realm altogether. The Visitor’s eyes are a bright blue that seems to pierce the defences of whoever gazes into them, and at times he is even accompanied by a blinding sunlight forming a halo behind his head. The ease with which he falls into the family’s life is surprisingly intimate, but also offers them a strange emotional healing from their private insecurities.

When Emilia the maid attempts suicide with a gas hose, the Visitor rescues and consoles her. As Pietro the son lies in bed at night, his new roommate soothes his fears. Outside on the grass, he approaches the sexually frustrated mother Lucia sunbathing in the nude and wraps her in his arms. The immature young daughter Odetta invites him into her virginal white room, opening herself up to new experiences. And finally, the ailing father Paolo finds a comforting peace in his guest’s presence, as both walk along a misty river and talk among wild, overgrown bushes.

Terrence Stamp’s Visitor is often found sitting with his legs open – is he a Christ figure, or is he just sexy? The bourgeoisie could easily mistake one for the other.
Picturesque long shots of the Italian countryside, misty and cold.

These are not merely innocent encounters, but Pasolini connects these characters’ spiritual awakenings to physical self-discoveries through explicit sexual seductions. As a result, each family member is individually bound to parallel journeys, methodically unfolding in the same, formulaic sequence established in the first act, and referenced in the film’s title Teorema – or ‘theorem’ in English.

Following the announcement of the Visitor’s imminent departure, it is according to this order that Pasolini subsequently moves through their confessions in their respective locations. They have all faced the transmutation of their own souls, and now all they can do is contemplate the irrelevance of their old lives, and the uncertainty of their futures. “I no longer even recognise myself,” Pietro reflects in his bedroom. “I was like everyone else, with many faults, perhaps, mine and those of the world around me. You made me different by taking me out of the natural order of things.”

Out on the lawn, Lucia reveals the “real and total interest” the Visitor filled her life with during his stay, and inside Odetta expresses thanks for helping her grow up and explore her sexuality. As for Paolo, who has always believed “in order, in the future, and above all in ownership,” this guest has destroyed everything he understands about himself and the world. The only way he can imagine rebuilding his identity would be through “a scandal tantamount to social suicide,” separating himself from the materialism and ego of the modern world to seek a deeper truth in his existence.

A green lawn, green furniture, green gates – Pasolini is committed to the colour in his mise-en-scène that slightly lifts this world out of reality.

As for Pasolini’s stance on the sanity of it all, he approaches the matter with both delicate consideration and savage criticism. This wealthy family have been living a superficial lie for many years, consumed by worldly distractions and capitalist privilege, and so cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini infuses these scenes at their Milanese estate with a pristine fragility. Characters are blocked in rigorous arrangements worthy of paintings as they lounge on the lawn and seat themselves symmetrically around the dinner table, though these meticulous visuals carry a strange tension with Pasolini’s naturalistic, handheld camerawork. The stylistic contrast is unsettling, subtly detaching the family from the reality of the working class witnessed in the opening scene’s documentary footage, while containing them within a dream of sepia filters and ethereal green hues weaved through the mansion’s gates, lawn, cars, and décor.

Rigid symmetry in the house of the bourgeoisie, holding together a pristine, fragile facade of order.
And in contrast to the curated blocking is the documentary footage of the opening, associating the working classes with a more naturalistic aesthetic of handheld camerawork.
The sepia filter Pasolini occasionally applies is otherworldly and alien, setting up this bourgeoisie family as people we cannot relate to.

Not that the extremity of their spiritual conversion is any less insane than the absurdity of their bloated privilege. Pasolini heavily implies that these nobles are so emotionally repressed they may simply be confusing the ecstasy of intercourse for divine revelation, further suggesting that the only two forces capable of tearing down oppressive class structures are sex and God – or at least, the unadulterated belief in them. Theological art and texts thus become ornamental in Teorema’s satire, displacing Ennio Morricone’s gloomy jazz score with Mozart’s haunting Requiem, and pondering Bible verses in contemplative voiceovers. Even here though, Pasolini is quoting the Book of Jeremiah to consider religion’s erasure of identity through sexual metaphors.

“You have seduced me, O Lord, and I have let myself be seduced. You have taken me by force, and you have prevailed. I have become an object of daily derision, and all mock me.”

Christian icons torment Lucia following the Visitor’s departure, stranding her in spiritual emptiness.

On one level, Pasolini is adopting the transcendent awe of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s films, gazing at impossible miracles of fasting, healing, and levitation performed by Emilia when she returns to her hometown. As the only main character here who belongs to the working class, she alone has the capacity to truly perceive and absorb the sacred, being unattached to the bourgeoisie’s material lifestyle. Her eventual sacrifice through live burial and self-immolation is even shot with an astounding beauty against the orange Italian sunset, capturing a glimpse of the sacred as she humbly resigns her body to the Earth.

Only the maid’s transformation truly intersects with the divine, performing astonishing miracles that cannot be explained.
Emilia’s hair also turns green, tying her into the ethereal colour palette.
Pasolini uses magic hour exquisitely in Emilia’s self-burial and immolation, resigning her body to the Earth.

Pasolini’s rigorous blocking of the family around Odetta’s catatonic state also visually alludes to the tragic funeral of a devoted believer in Dreyer’s Ordet, but there is no profound resurrection to be found here. The rest of this newly inspired family is as lost as ever, seeing Lucia aimlessly search for fulfilment through affairs with younger men, and Pietro express his lustrous longing for the absent Visitor through abstract painting. Art may be elevated in the eyes of upper-class society, but the son’s internal self-worth is thoroughly degraded as he recognises the lowliness and misery of any honest creator.

“Nobody must realise that the artist is a poor, trembling idiot, a second-rate hack who lives by taking chances and risks, like a disgraced child, his life reduced to the absurd melancholy of one who lives debased by the feeling of something lost forever.”

Odetta’s physical decline evokes the visual solemnity of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet. Rather than a divine resurrection though, Pasolini cynically displays a spiritual death in this superbly blocked composition.
Lucia goes searching for the physical intimacy that the Visitor once provided, only to find emptiness in carnal pleasures.
Pietro is driven to abstract artistic expression in the absence of the Visitor, trying and failing to capture the essence of the sublime. Each family member’s reaction to realising the desolation of their own souls is diverse and indicting.

This extends further to the other members of this family who now spend their lives searching for an irrecoverable connection to a higher purpose, though perhaps Paolo understands the insanity of it more than anyone. Driven mad by his own empty existence, he enters a train station and strips himself completely nude, before handing the entire factory over to his workers. A victory is secured for Pasolini’s Marxist politics, returning the means of production to the industrial proletariat, while the black, desolate dunes of Mt Etna which have appeared intermittently throughout Teorema beckon a demented Paolo away from civilisation.

Unfortunately, whatever secrets the ancient volcano holds are inaccessible to this former capitalist, whose renunciation of all material possessions has only exposed his own hollowness. He runs through these landscapes in agony, as if trying to find some justification for his total sacrifice, but there is no power great enough to heal those souls eroded by pride and entitlement. Finally seeing themselves for what they are, all the bourgeoisie of Teorema can do is scream into a void that even God dare not touch, devolving into a state of repulsive, primal desperation that Pasolini knows can never be fulfilled.

Paolo’s reaction to losing the Visitor is the most insane of the lot, shamefully bearing his naked to the public and exiling himself to the wilderness.
A brilliantly mystifying formal pay-off to the Mt Etna cutaways as Paolo screams into the void, unable to find the answers he seeks.

Teorema is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD and Blu-ray is available to purchase on Amazon.

All of Us Strangers (2023)

Andrew Haigh | 1hr 45min

When lonely screenwriter Adam meets his mother and father for the first time in over 30 years, it seems as if barely any time has passed at all. The reunion comes as a cathartic experience, letting them catch up on significant life events they have missed, apologise for past misgivings, and appreciate each other as fully rounded humans, despite his parents being preserved in the exact same state that he remembers from right before their deaths. They are quite literally living in the past, coming to terms with his queerness in an era where AIDS is running rampant, and not being fully aware of the details that surround their fatal car accident. Grief has suffocated Adam into a repressed silence for many decades, and only now can the adult orphan find closure with those who inadvertently started it, opening him up to new relationships and experiences that he had always walled himself off from.

Therein lies the second narrative thread of All of Us Strangers, completing this four-hander with Adam’s far more outgoing neighbour, Harry. His drunken, flirtatious visit one night to Adam’s apartment is greeted with shy reservation and gentle rejection, though our protagonist’s interest is officially piqued and a relationship soon begins. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal’s chemistry is beautifully realised in their complementary performances, basking in the simmering excitement of new love. When they aren’t out partying in London’s nightclubs, they lay in each other’s arms back home, discussing their shared experiences of growing up homosexual in the 1980s and the amusing semantic difference between being “queer” and “gay.”

For a time, All of Us Strangers is caught in a repetitive structure alternating between Adam’s interactions with his parents and his dates with Harry, though Andrew Haigh suffuses each scene with an ambiguous, dreamy quality that becomes increasingly disorientating. Visually, he dimly washes Adam’s home in a burnt orange lighting, romantically consuming them in the colours of a sunset that never seems to fade. Haigh’s use of mirrors also makes for some fractured compositions that frequently isolate Adam within his apartment, and alternately create countless doubles inside his building’s elevator that symbolically surrounds him with illusions on all sides. After all, what are these visions of his parents if not imaginary extensions of himself?

The existential malaise that encompasses Adam’s life continues even when he ventures out into public, suggesting a hint of Sofia Coppola’s delicate meditations that contain her characters within lonely bubbles. Haigh languishes in the tranquillity of his visual storytelling, drifting along soothing waves of synthesised drones and long dissolves that steadily disintegrate our sense of time, until we too can barely grasp the difference between Adam’s dreams and reality. While high on ketamine at a club, visions of his long-term future with Harry give way to further hallucinations, and from there each new scene takes us deeper into the surreal layers of his subconscious.

As Adam lies in his parents’ bed and listens to his mother speak of old regrets, an overhead shot slowly zooms in on their faces, before slyly letting those figments of his imagination disappear altogether. Travelling through the London Underground, he sees the warped reflection of his younger self scream into the tunnel’s black void. Stirred by a newfound confidence, he finally decides to introduce Harry to his parents, and his delusion is painfully brought to light when they both find his childhood home dark and empty.

Haigh commands his magical realism with subdued wonder and unease all through All of Us Strangers, persisting even through its genuinely shocking snap back to reality in the final scenes that reveals the full, heartbreaking extent of Adam’s daydreams. Human connection is a saving grace for those carrying enormous emotional burdens, and without it many may simply fade into the miasma of modern living. At least in its absence, Adam can find solace and guidance through its imagined substitute, wistfully summoning up ghosts of childhood memories and alternate lives that he might have once led.

All of Us Strangers is currently playing in theatres.

The Iron Claw (2023)

Sean Durkin | 2hr 12min

The family curse that is rumoured to have haunted the Von Erich wrestling empire hangs heavy over The Iron Claw. It is said that when patriarch Fritz Von Erich changed his surname from Adkisson to his mother’s maiden name, he brought misfortune upon all those who carried it on, including his eldest son Jack Jr who passed away in an accident at the young age of 5. One random tragedy on its own is simply bad luck, surviving brother Kevin believes, and has little to do with superstition. Still, the more disasters that pile up, the harder it is to deny the presence of some invisible force setting each child of the Von Erich family on a slow, agonising path to total ruin.

Beyond fate and luck, perhaps there is a third, far more rational reason behind the heartbreaking catastrophes hunting these brothers down though. Fritz’s ambitious drive to preserve his family legacy may very well be his own biggest threat, and only escalates in response to the damage it does. Surely Jack Jr’s freak death can’t be put down to this, and neither can the sudden onset of David’s enteritis, but the young wrestler’s decision to ignore physical pain in pursuit of greatness certainly aligns with his hard-headed father’s no-excuses credo. Although much of The Iron Claw is framed through the eyes of Kevin, it is Fritz who becomes the most compelling character in his selfish push for glory, openly playing favourites with his sons to breed competition and excellence.

If anything, this Darwinian approach to parenting hurts his relationship with his children more than their bonds with each other. The devastation that is wreaked on their lives is made even more gut-wrenching by Sean Durkin’s portrayal of them as such close companions, never placing their personal ambitions over their family. Fritz may not bear a lot of fondness for Mike, the youngest and least interested in wrestling, but his own brothers don’t think twice about supporting his musical aspirations, and Kevin similarly never lets his friendly rivalry with David and Kerry wither into animosity. When illnesses, accidents, and suicides begin to pick them off, we can see the mental burden placed on Kevin as he anxiously accepts the possibility of a family curse, and yet Fritz can only seal his anguish tight behind a stoic denial of responsibility.

It is also at this point that Durkin begins to reveal the true nature of The Iron Claw – not as a conventional sports biopic about underdogs rising to the top, but a patient, psychological drama obsessed with the thin division between destiny and chance. Enormous weight is placed on a single coin flip that will determine whether Kevin or Kerry will take David’s place in a major fight, and that is all it takes to set off a new chain of events that sees Kerry lose his foot in a motorbike accident, Mike step up to represent the Von Erich empire, and subsequently suffer permanent brain damage. Perhaps with a more supportive father the misfortune might have ended there, and yet in Fritz’s mind the only way to move forward is to raise the bar even higher, setting the mental health of his sons on the same downward trajectory as their physical welfare.

The visceral impact of Durkin’s editing and lighting heavily evoke Raging Bull in early boxing scenes, but his direction also submits to a subdued despair the deeper we get into The Iron Claw’s narrative, turning an introspective eye towards Kevin’s trauma. Durkin knows when to step back on the montages and hold on a shot, often pairing them with a slow zoom that draws our eye to both the foreground and background, and creating a subtle discomfort that jarringly runs against these wrestlers’ dynamic energy. Long dissolves become more common here too, creating an ethereal disorientation that formally matches supernatural visions of ghosts appearing just within the peripheral view of living characters, eerily out of focus.

Zac Efron’s performance fits well into this uncanny atmosphere, simultaneously carrying an enormous, beefy physique and great emotional vulnerability. Directly proportional to the immensity of his adversity is the anger which he unleashes in the wrestling ring, uncontrollably mounting until he is disqualified for continuing to use the ‘Iron Claw’ on his opponent past the ringing of the bell. The irony that this was once Fritz’s signature move is not lost on Durkin. In trying to become their father, each of the Von Erich children sacrifice a little bit of their own sanity and wellbeing, falling to a psychological darkness that many of them never escape from.

Though there is the faintest tinge of horror and suspense attached to Durkin’s direction, The Iron Claw would be better described as an extended tragedy underscored by persistent fear, only letting its overwhelming grief resolve into tearful reflection in the final act. “Tonight, I walk with my brothers,” are the last words of the last Von Erich suicide note, and Durkin brings a tender sensitivity to his visualisation of such a heavenly meeting. If this family curse is real, then perhaps it merely takes the form of poor parenting rather than some evil superstition, and yet the end results are virtually indistinguishable. It is the descendants of the damned who suffer most in either case, as the sins of the prideful, overbearing father prey on the only good thing to have spawned from his legacy – the unwavering kinship of brotherly love.

The Iron Claw is currently playing in theatres.

Nyad (2023)

Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi | 2hr

It may just be a coincidence that swimmer Diana Nyad’s surname translates to “water nymph” in Greek, but that doesn’t stop her from reminding every second person she meets of this connection. Her destiny is written into her very being, she believes, and there is very little that can shake her focus from the objective that has eluded her for over thirty years – to swim the 110-mile strait between Cuba and Florida without a shark cage. She had failed once before at the age of 28, and now in her 60s the disappointment still hasn’t faded, relentlessly pushing her forward with passion and grit to become the first person to accomplish this feat of remarkable endurance.

Coming from the world of documentaries, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have specialised in subjects who test the limits of their physical capabilities, whether it is the mountain climber of Free Solo scaling El Capitan or the cave divers saving the Thai soccer team in The Rescue. With its basis in the true story of Diana’s extraordinary achievement, Nyad makes for a natural leap into narrative filmmaking for the husband-and-wife duo, playing to their strengths by cutting in newsreels and talk shows from her youth. While much of this archival footage is a disheartening reminder of Diana’s initial failure, the voiceover of her younger self also delivers inspiration, driving her onward with reminders of her unique strength.

“The whole key to success in marathon swimming, masochistic as it may seem, is the person who succeeds is willing to ensure the most pain in the most number of hours.”

She may not readily admit to it, but Diana is also a woman who is deeply and sentimentally attached to the past, which Nyad further develops in its dreamy flashbacks. Even beyond her frustration in her previous let-down, she holds onto the memory of her father’s idyllic adoration of Cuba, and the PTSD of her sexual abuse at the hands of her childhood swimming coach. “I hate victim shit,” she spits, trying to brush off the lifetime of pain it has caused her, and yet it is virtually inseparable from the tenacious, self-punishing perseverance that pushes her on.

It is fortunate then at least that Diana has her long-time coach, best friend, and platonic soulmate Bonnie by her side, offering her the holistic care and concern that she is unwilling to give herself. The rapport between Annette Bening and Jodie Foster in these roles is compelling, revealing several decades worth of camaraderie in their blunt honesty and deep knowledge of each other’s idiosyncrasies. When Diana rates a pain in her shoulder as a 6 out of 10, Bonnie knows very well that actually equals “a normal person’s 8,” and so too does she realise that fabricating a story about authorities declaring the swim to be impossible would make her friend dig in even deeper.

There is no understating the role that Bonnie plays in her journey. Although Diana is the swimmer, Bening and Foster are effectively co-leads in Nyad, striving towards a common goal with equal passion. While Diana suffers a great deal physically and mentally, Bonnie bears an enormous emotional toll, realising that she is encouraging her friend’s death wish and receiving little recognition for her efforts. Still, the bond they share is undeniable, often returning to a comforting motto of reassurance and fortitude whenever insecurity begins to creep in.

“Onward.”

Through the danger of sea creatures, allergic reactions, and dehydration, Diana and Bonnie keep this maxim at heart – if not on a physical level during several more failed swims, then at least mentally. That willpower is their strength after all, and what Diana especially relies upon with an older body that has weakened since her youth. At times the obstacles they come up against are a little too clearly contrived for the sake of plot, and it doesn’t help either that the sharks are rendered through shoddy CGI. Instead, the ocean often feels far more perilous in those eerie night sequences where Diana’s rope light sheds an eerie red glow within the darkness, revealing the beauty and terror of the world she is seeking to conquer.

Somehow though, it is still those final miles that are the most difficult to overcome, propelling both Diana and Bonnie to the brink of absolute exhaustion even as the destination comes into view. Nyad may be straightforward in its underdog tale of struggle and success, but it earns these emotional beats well through its visceral, physical danger. For Diana, destiny is nothing more than a matter of tenacity and patience, driving one’s body to its extremes simply to prove that it can be done.

Nyad is currently streaming on Netflix.

Rumble Fish (1983)

Francis Ford Coppola | 1hr 34min

The legendary Motorcycle Boy may not be our protagonist in Rumble Fish, though this doesn’t keep Francis Ford Coppola from filtering the urban landscapes of 1960s Oklahoma through his eyes. Whatever visual restrictions are imposed by the greaser’s colour blindness are drastically offset by the dreamy expressionism elongating every angle, the timelapse footage slipping through hours in a few seconds, and perhaps most significantly, those tiny splashes of blue and red swimming through the local pet shop’s aquarium.

It isn’t that these vivid Siamese fighting fish are somehow exceptions to the Motorcycle Boy’s optical deficiency, but they occupy his attention like nothing else in this world. As he peers through the glass with his little brother Rusty James, Coppola’s camera traps both men and fish inside the same tank, drawing an oppressive visual comparison to the confinement and aggression of their fellow juvenile delinquents. Freedom is distant, but if they are to find peace with themselves and stop fighting their own reflections, it may be their only hope.

“They belong in the river. I don’t think that they would fight if they were in the river. If they had the room to live.”

An incredibly apt use of colour in an otherwise black-and-white film, while the Motorcycle Boy and Rusty James’ faces are trapped within the same tank as the fish.

Some time ago the Motorcycle Boy was a notorious gang leader, and the graffiti that bears his name all over town is a testament to that larger-than-life reputation. Having recently returned from his vagrant travels, he has experienced a taste of the liberation that he now desires for these fish. His emotional transformation is unmistakable in Mickey Rourke’s mellow, tender performance. He is not looking to vent any pent-up frustration, as so many other boys are. He brushes off accusations of madness with a gentle smile, and speaks with a soft voice that quells the frenzied fury around him. Twice in Rumble Fish do we watch him nurse a wounded Rusty James back to health, modelling a sensitive masculinity that seeks to heal rather than destroy, and very gradually he inspires his brother to follow him down a similar path. His colourblind view of the world is not a restriction, we come to realise, but perceives far more of its beauty than anyone else can imagine.

Coming out on the heels of The Outsiders in 1983, Rumble Fish was the second S.E. Hinton adaptation to be released that year. Both stories are based in the same setting of 1960s Tulsa, exploring the emotional depths of young greasers looking to escape the violence surrounding them, and yet the sheer gap in artistic quality between the two is so shocking that it is hard to believe Coppola directed them in consecutive shoots. The Outsiders was the greater commercial success and is far more accessible to mainstream audiences looking for an easy watch. Rumble Fish may have been more polarising, but it is also the far greater cinematic accomplishment on every level, bringing an augmented visual aesthetic to Hinton’s writing that resonates deeply with its paradoxical adolescent yearning for both excitement and stability.

Timelapses track the movement of clouds and shadows throughout Tulsa, slipping hours away within a few seconds. These interludes are key to Coppola’s structure and formal manipulations of time.

Adding onto that uncertainty a sense of urgency pressing these young people to sort their lives out before growing up, and the world at large seems to be working against them at every turn. Coppola weaves in his timelapse photography as a powerfully formal representation of this, cutting away to clouds racing across reflective surfaces and shadows rapidly stretching along the ground, while Stewart Copeland’s percussive score ticks and beats out propulsive rhythms in the background. The clocks that Coppola lays all throughout his mise-en-scène continue this poetic exploration of time invisibly passing by, even using a giant one as a backdrop to Rusty James’ confrontation with a police officer, and calling back to the dream sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries with its eerie lack of hour and minute hands. As teenagers, abstract concepts like time aren’t exactly at the forefront of their thoughts, yet local barkeeper Benny offers a sharp perspective in his voiceover that acutely pinpoints the transience of their youth.

“Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see when you’re young, you’re a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw a couple of years here, a couple of years there, it doesn’t matter. The older you get you say ‘Jesus how much I got, I got 35 summers left.’ Think about it – 35 summers.”

Clocks laid throughout Coppola’s mise-en-scène, making for some powerful symbolism that integrates formally with the timelapse photography. In the lives of these teenagers, time is not a constant that can be relied upon – it speeds up and slows down all over the place.

For the young men and women of Tulsa who are not yet facing their mortality though, this irrational distortion of time is not to be pondered, but revelled in. Coppola is not one to exclude us from its subjectivity either – everyday life in Tulsa is visually heightened to an incredible degree, warping the proportions of the city’s infrastructure with an incredibly deep focus, canted angles, and split diopter lenses. Coppola’s world is in a perpetual state of commotion and contortion that verges on film noir, flooding scenes with smoke, flashing lights, and spraying water that serve no other purpose than to create incredibly dynamic imagery, and navigating these elements in long, evocative tracking shots. The dreamy atmosphere is laid on thick, loosely detaching us from reality as Rusty James envisions scantily clad women lying on classroom shelves, and deliriously hallucinates his spirit flying from his body and across town to observe the flattering grief left in wake of his imaginary death.

Surrealism in Rusty James’ active, hormonal imagination, picturing half-naked women atop shelves in class.
Coppola employs an excellent depth of field, especially in his occasional use of split diopters as observed here.
Coppola’s scenery is incredibly dynamic with energetic cameras, flashing lights, constant smoke, vigorous fight choreography – the number of moving parts in any given shot is astounding.

In essence, Coppola transforms a setting that most people would view as a monotonous into a fantasy land, dreamed up by mavericks wishing to break free of convention and conformity. To many small-minded locals, this eccentricity is something to be shunned, though there is a wisdom to be found in those who see its value. Rusty James’ father may be drunk and idle, but he is still among the few who sees his eldest son’s open-mindedness as a gift.

“Every now and then a person comes along, has a different view of the world than a usual person. Doesn’t make ‘em crazy. I mean, an acute perception, that doesn’t make you crazy.”

Right after Dennis Hopper slurs his way through this counsel though, he adds a caveat, drawing a very thin line in his precise wording.

“However, sometimes… it can drive you crazy, an acute perception.”

Expressionistic imagery captured through the ultra-wide angle lens and black-and-white photography, filtering everyday life in Tulsa through unconventional perspectives and a heavily subjective camera.
A delirious hallucination of Rusty James’ death, floating through town as he dreamily observes those who mourn him after his passing.
Vibrant expressionism in the angular shadows and industrial set pieces, heightening every scene to an extraordinary degree.

In this same conversation, we begin to understand where he gained this insight, and where the Motorcycle Boy might have inherited his personality – not from his father, but from his mother who abandoned her children while they were still young. Outsiders like these can only be contained in their loneliness for so long before drastically breaking free, frustrated by others’ narrow thinking. The Motorcycle Boy could have easily followed in his mother’s footsteps and run away a second time, but his enormous empathy turns him down another path instead, roping Rusty James into his mission to let the Siamese fighting fish swim free into the river.

If there is one mark that Motorcycle Boy wants to leave on the world though, it is not the liberation of these vibrant red and blue fish, but the liberation of Tulsa’s restless youth – or at the very least Rusty James. He does not seek to uphold any personal legacy, and yet it nevertheless forms in his absence, keeping his pacificist principles alive while his persecution by a prejudiced society is taken to its bitterly logical end. A single police gunshot cuts off the score’s pounding beat at the moment it takes his life, leaving only Rusty James to pick up the fish now flopping on the grass, and finish what his brother had started. The communal mourning that he once imagined in a dream manifests at last, though this time not for him, as Coppola’s sombre long take floats along a line of familiar faces gazing upon the Motorcycle Boy’s body with sorrow and horror.

Starting from the Motorcycle Boy’s dead body, the camera floats along a trail of minor and supporting characters from throughout the film, binding them in a common grief.

The final shot of Rumble Fish does not announce itself with the same audacious energy of Coppola’s expressionistic angles or timelapse footage, and yet the tranquil stillness of Rusty James’ arrival at the coast his brother always longed for marks a subtle departure from the chaos of Tulsa. For once there is very little depth to Coppola’s photography, as a telephoto lens instead flattens the liberated teenager’s silhouette against a vast, endless ocean, and time seems to slow down. The world of Rumble Fish may not be meant for those unusually perceptive misfits living far outside the status quo, but the best the rest of us can do is follow in their footsteps, boldly journeying beyond the borders and standards of a modern society slowly driving each of us mad.

The final shot formally marks the first use of a telephoto lens in Rumble Fish as opposed to Coppola’s ultra-wide lens, flattening the depth of field into a single layer – tranquility, freedom, and solitude expressed in a single image.

Rumble Fish is currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Video, and the DVD or Blu-ray can be purchased on Amazon.

Ferrari (2023)

Michael Mann | 2hr 11min

It is said in Roman mythology that when Saturn learned of a prophecy foretelling his downfall at the hands of one of his children, he set out to eat each of them as they were born. As a man desperately searching for an heir to his business and family name, Enzo Ferrari may not possess great sympathy for the King of Gods, and yet the journalist who draws this comparison may not be so far off given the devastation that is visited upon young men looking to earn the entrepreneur’s admiration.

Unlike those unfortunate souls, Enzo would much prefer to sit above the fray of motor racing as an engineer and businessman, coaching the drivers of his automobiles rather than risking his own life behind the wheel. He understands their addiction to the sport all too well, and uses that to feed their sense of competition by telling them individually that they alone each have the best chance of winning against each other. This is ”our deadly passion, our terrible joy,” he grimly declares, though his romanticisation of its lethal danger is not easily missed.

With Ferrari premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, the eight years that separate it from Michael Mann’s previous film Blackhat is the longest period of dormancy in his career, beating out the six years which had divided that espionage thriller from Public Enemies. That this is the story he chose to break the drought is somewhat surprising given the crime and action films that otherwise define his career, but this is not the first time he has ventured into biopic territory either, having previously used the genre to examine the legacy of boxing legend Muhammed Ali. In this instance, the awe he holds for the founder of the Ferrari brand is clearly a prime interest for him, stretching all the way back to the early 2000s when he first began exploring a potential film adaptation. Enzo is exactly the sort of morally compromised man whose ruthless pursuit of a singular objective aligns with many of Mann’s greatest characters, and yet who also hides all his pride, shame, and sorrow behind tinted sunglasses.

After Adam Driver’s recent stint as the head of the titular fashion brand in House of Gucci, his second shot at playing another Italian entrepreneur of the twentieth century is a moderate improvement. His talent is undeniable as he remarkably passes off as a man in his late 50s, outshining a poorly miscast Shailene Woodley as his mistress Lina Lardi, though often being outdone by the raw fire of Penélope Cruz. Much of her storyline in Ferrari as his wife Laura is spent furiously narrowing in on her husband’s secret family, drawing her determination from a bottomless well of grief over the recent passing of their son. That Enzo is so prepared to replace the deceased Alfredo with his illegitimate child is an insult to his memory, she vehemently asserts, desperately trying to preserve the remnants of her broken family.

Perhaps the blame that Laura places on Enzo for their son’s terminal illness is unjustified, but it certainly reinforces that image of a God feasting on the deaths of his children. If we are to view his drivers as his descendants too, then the fact that he took one of their widows to be his mistress is entirely damning. As the untouchable head of the Ferrari family, he exerts an influence which even pulls the Roman Catholic church itself into his orbit, becoming a Don Corleone figure in a scene that alludes heavily to The Godfather. As Enzo listens to a homily about car manufacturing, the sounds of his competitor’s vehicles can be heard clearly from a nearby test track. Stopwatches are withdrawn from the congregation’s pockets as they line up for communion, vigorously ticking along with the score while Mann sharply intercuts between both locations. In place of God, it is Ferrari who reigns over this sacred building, holding greater respect for speed, efficiency, and victory than human life.

Nowhere do the consequences of this idolatry becomes so devastatingly apparent than in the Mille Miglia of 1957. This was historically the last time the open-road, thousand-mile endurance race was played out, and for very good reason. Where the rest of the film suffers from flaws in its pacing, these thirty minutes carry a thrilling momentum in its razor-sharp editing, even when we cut to scenes of Enzo, Laura, and other characters following the competition from a distance. Dispersed throughout this heart-pumping sequence too are some of the film’s finest long shots, basking in the green valleys and dusty orange skies of Italy’s countryside, before moving into the cobbled streets and narrow streets of Rome. Once again, the sound of ticking stopwatches weaves into the music score with urgency, while dolly zooms queasily warp the road ahead of Enzo’s driver Alfonso de Portago through the quiet rural commune of Cavriana, luring him to an awful fate.

European car racing history is littered with tragedies, and the Mille Maglia was especially no stranger to participants and spectators losing their lives in fatal collisions. That Mann so unflinchingly presents the accident which officially brought an end to this specific race is profoundly shocking. The blown-out tyre which causes it may be caught in slow-motion, but the car’s violent cleaving through a crowd of bystanders happens so fast that the only hope we can cling to is that death came instantly and painlessly.

Whether the environment of ruthless competitiveness that Enzo fostered was responsible for Portago’s decision against changing his worn tyres is delicately uncertain, and later leads into a court trial that Ferrari brushes over far too quickly in its abrupt ending. To Mann though, the details of his manslaughter charge and its eventual dismissal are unimportant. Far more fascinating is Enzo’s reaction as he visits the gruesome site where eleven lives were claimed, including those of five children. Like a coroner examining a mangled carcass, he picks through the wreckage of his race car, barely even turning his eyes to the crushed and severed corpses around him. If the media vilifies Enzo as a deity who props up his legacy by feasting on the lives of his own children, then perhaps they are merely carrying through the justice that was never delivered in court. For all of Ferrari’s narrative unevenness, the god of conquest at the centre of Mann’s modern mythologising makes for a compellingly thorny subject, leaving behind a long trail of bodies in his blood-stained ascent to cultural immortality.

Ferrari is currently playing in theatres.

Dream Scenario (2023)

Kristoffer Borgli | 1hr 41min

The nature of celebrity culture is a fickle thing for Professor Paul Matthews, as wild and unpredictable as those strangers’ dreams across the world that star him as the main character. There is no rational reason for why they started, and there is no explanation why his role in them suddenly evolves from passive bystander to monstrous villain. Perhaps it is a reflection of his own insecurity, feeding a disastrous loop of self-loathing that amplifies the more he worries about the way others are perceiving him, though director Kristoffer Borgli is evidently more interested in Dream Scenario’s metaphysical allegory than its hard logic. Paul’s sudden rising star comes with its own trappings that most regular people would be ill-equipped to handle, and especially one as meek and obsessively self-conscious as this “inadequate loser.”

The combination of Nicolas Cage’s eccentric neurosis and a lightly absurdist screenplay that exposes an anxiety-ridden dork no doubt has the essence of Charlie Kaufman’s insanity baked into its conception, with notable touches of both Adaptation and Being John Malkovich thrown in the mix. Borgli delights in the feverish surrealism of his characters’ dreams, initially drawn from the sheer incongruity of seeing Cage’s nonchalant reactions to extreme disasters and emergencies, before escalating into psychotic horror scenarios that have him violently killing people Freddy Krueger-style – and this movie reference does not go amiss either. Whether he is casually watching one of his students be chased by a tall, bloody man through a field of tuxedoed men, or maniacally marching down a dark corridor to his daughter’s bedroom with a frightening grin, Dream Scenario is at its strongest exploring the irrational language of the human subconscious.

Although Paul is at the centre of this whole phenomenon, the fact that he is not experiencing these dreams himself ironically places him on the outside looking in. The hushed whispers between his students in the early days quietly single him out as a freak, and when the media eventually turns him into an idol, he can only approach his newfound fame with awkward, confused laughs. An amusing turn from Michael Cera as the head of an agency for unconventional celebrities simply called ‘Thoughts?’ further strains the tension between Paul’s integrity and readiness to sell out all his ideals too, as well as his own loyalty to his wife when the opportunity arises.

The true danger of Dream Scenario arrives though in the target that is effectively placed on Paul’s back, teased early on when a disturbed stranger breaks into his home with death threats, and arriving in full force when these dreams suddenly turn into nightmares that plunge his reputation into total infamy. Of course, this shift is not totally in his control, but is that not the nature of widespread public opinion?

As a frustrated Paul lashes out, records insincere apology videos, and continues to be harassed by strangers totally convinced of their own judgement, it gradually becomes clear that Borgli isn’t quite sure how to stick the landing besides letting it fizzle out with his character’s dwindling 15 minutes of fame. Dream Scenario is not especially profound in its interrogation of cancel culture, though it does display flashes of creative inspiration in Paul’s characterisation, comically framing multiple lines of the company name ‘Thoughts?’ behind his overthinking head, and weaving in his evolutionary biology background through a fitting zebra motif. The animal’s natural ability to camouflage within crowds closely aligns with Paul’s desire to sink back into obscurity, effectively using inconspicuousness as a survival mechanism to preserve a safe, boring life. If he is going to stand out to anyone as a “remarkable nobody,” then it isn’t going to be for strangers, young women, or fellow celebrities. The only people whose approval he needs are those who already know him better than everyone else, and who only ever dream about him being the best version of Paul that he can be.

Dream Scenario is currently playing in theatres.

Poor Things (2023)

Yorgos Lanthimos | 2hr 21min

Unlike Mary Shelley and her fellow Gothic writers, Yorgos Lanthimos is not greatly bothered by man’s displacement of God through scientific progress. The artificial creation of life in Poor Things no doubt induces feelings of profound discomfort and horror, though the ethical dilemmas raised here are more fanciful in their eccentric incongruencies and psychological implications. Where Frankenstein hid great existential horror within the prospect of creating artificial life, Poor Things hides a majestic appreciation for humanity within an even more disturbing biological experiment – the transplant of an unborn baby’s brain into the body of her tragically deceased mother. When confronted with accusations of transgressing the laws of nature, mad scientist Dr Godwin Baxter returns a simple question that lightens his moral darkness to a medium grey.

“Would you rather the world had not have Bella?”

It is true that he has sentenced this infant to grow up inside the body of an adult, but so too has he effectively saved her life. In much the same way a child reveres their parent or a believer worships their deity, Bella appropriately gives her own endearing nickname to the professor – God. Along with his duck-dog hybrids and barking rooster, she joins his fantastic menagerie of similarly Frankensteined creatures that he leads as a lumpy misfit of the highest order. Lanthimos doesn’t hide the Garden of Eden allegory that encases Bella in a sanctuary of grotesque innocence, though the overtness of the metaphor is no concern. After all, it is merely the starting point for Bella’s coming-of-age odyssey across Europe and Africa, where Lanthimos aims his offbeat, satirical wit at the modern complexities of sex and gender.

Lanthimos’ allusions to Frankenstein are right there on the surface, but it is the reinvention of Mary Shelley’s work in a surreal, disturbing allegory which keeps Poor Things from becoming derivative.
Bella is a mix of Eve and the Prodigal Son – born into God’s grotesque Garden of Eden, she falls to temptation and leaves on a magnificent journey, only to be welcomed back with open arms.

With The Favourite being a watershed moment for Lanthimos’ development as a cinematic artist, Poor Things continues that stylistic trajectory of surreal brilliance which elevates his most recent work above his first few films. His auteur trademarks are instantly recognisable, distorting detailed sets through wide-angle lenses to dramatically stretch its elaborate features, and fish-eye lenses that seem like voyeuristic peepholes. Long dissolves are also Lanthimos’ editing device of choice to convey his characters’ slippery grasp on reality, just as our own perspective is challenged in visual gags that force us to look twice at images as simple as a horse pulling a carriage. No doubt his continued collaboration with writer Tony McNamara pays off marvellously as well, delivering an absurd, biting wit that punctuates stiff formalities with anachronistic profanities and heightened slapstick.

Lanthimos brings back the fish-eye lens from The Favourite. It’s formally well-done in the way it is carried through, and adds a great deal to this visually distorted world.

And yet even with all these similarities in mind, the epic adventure that carries Bella across oceans in Poor Things is far more sprawling than the tightly contained worlds of Lanthimos’ other films. For the first time in his career, soundstages are used in place of real locations, allowing for a level of visual control and curation that his previous budgets could not afford. Traces of Terry Gilliam’s eccentric surrealism can be found everywhere, adopting avant-garde camera angles that warp insanely constructed set pieces beyond any hint of realism, from God’s giant Gothic manor to the castle-like cruise ship of turrets and towers. Tracking shots and zooms navigate these scenes with a steady fluidity, as rigorously measured as the production design itself, though they only barely mask the hidden chaos of Bella’s existence.

A superb use of miniatures in these long shots, set beneath a sky that always seems to be in motion with wispy clouds and rich, impressionistic patterns.
Lanthimos formally sets Bella’s confinement to God’s manor apart from her journey through stunning black-and-white photography, only letting colour take over when she rebels and sets out to discovery the world.

At its most dreamlike, Poor Things interprets Bella’s voyage through wispy, greyscale images of her riding grotesque fish and crossing bridges in slow-motion, and uses these abstractions as chapter breaks between each new location. Within her actual adventure, purple swirls and angry blue clouds stretch across vast, starry skies that could have been painted by Vincent van Gogh, and cast impressionistic textures over miniatures of steampunk cities. In Lisbon, trams are suspended by wires between 19th-century buildings, and hot air balloons shaped like UFOs float above the urban skyline. Elsewhere, Alexandria is depicted as a sandstone hellscape of extreme poverty steeped in fiery golden hues, and the monochromatic streets of Paris offer respite with its sheets of soft, powdery snow. The idiosyncratic palettes of these settings are also made all the more vibrant by Lanthimos’ choice to starkly shoot most of the film’s first act in black-and-white, formally sectioning off Bella’s confinement to God’s manor from her extraordinary, colourful journey of discovery.

Lisbon is an anachronistic, steampunk city of high-wire trams and hot air balloons – absolute magnificence in production design.
Bella’s brief stopover in Alexandria is soaked in blazing gold palette – absolute uniformity to an aesthetic.
Meanwhile, Paris is a jungle of beautiful architectural oddities blanketed in snow.

With such an imaginative production design landing Poor Things among the most handsome films of the past few years, and a screenplay as boldly funny as McNamara’s, it takes an extravagantly talented ensemble to match this heightened world. Ramy Youssef and Jerrod Carmichael are the only ones who apply a little too much restraint here, while Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo strike a perfect balance between chewing the scenery and precise comic timing.

To go this long without mentioning Emma Stone though is a crime. Her achievement as Bella stands among her very best, playing out an extraordinary but gradual evolution from incoherent infancy to liberated young adulthood. “What a very pretty retard,” her future husband proclaims early on as he watches her toddler-self jump and spin in uncoordinated motions, and it is this incongruency between her mind and body which forms the rich foundation of Lanthimos’ comedy and drama. Given her womanly appearance, Bella is not shielded from society’s archaic gender politics, and yet like most children she is a being of pure impulse who pursues whatever momentary sensory pleasures come her way. In this unique instance, it is only natural that her sexual discovery of “furious jumping” quickly becomes a carnal yet innocent obsession, and one that men like rakish cad Duncan Wedderburn selfishly seek to exploit.

Emma Stone’s performance stands tall among her best, showcasing her comedic range with slapstick and verbal timing in a way she has never touched before.

The physical comedy and rapport that Stone and Ruffalo share as adventuring partners here is gleefully charming, especially during one dance scene calling back to The Favourite that lets them unleash ridiculous moves to a bizarre honking instrument. It is when Bella begins to rub up against Duncan’s misogynistic entitlement that her place in the world slowly comes into focus, even as she remains ignorant to her origins. Distressed by the pain she sees in her travels, she tries to donate a large portion of Duncan’s wealth to the needy, only to naively let it fall into the hands of untrustworthy sailors. When she eagerly takes up employment as prostitute against his wishes, she grows further disillusioned with the discovery that some men find pleasure in her pain, and that her employer would prefer her to remain submissive.

After Emma Stone, Lanthimos gathers a strong supporting cast led by a rakish Mark Ruffalo, who has never been funnier than he is here.

Deepening the question of Bella’s bodily autonomy though is the very nature of her being – this is not her body, but her mother’s. Her belly bears the scar of her own birth by C-section, strangers recognise her as a different person in public, and late discoveries about her mother’s suicide complicate the relationship they never had. Having strayed from God’s domain and partnered with a gutless chauvinist, she is forced to become her own maternal guide in a misogynistic world, navigating its arbitrary social conventions through little more than trial and error. She learns of indulgence and restraint, generosity and self-care, taking each in moderation as her mind slowly catches up to her physical appearance. Jerskin Fendrix reveals his aggressively abstract score to be a perfect mirror of this journey as well, initially offering a window into her infantile mind with untuned strings, breathy pipes, and jarring mallets, and then gradually layering in more complex textures as these sounds mature alongside her.

Vacuous pretensions of respectable society be damned, Bella is a woman looking to carve out her own peculiar path through the world, rebelling against God’s creation even as she expresses a deep, abiding love for him. It matters little that Lanthimos’ final act sticks an unsteady landing, heading off on a sudden new adventure that continues past the point the story should have wrapped up. Films as boldly ambitious and wickedly funny as Poor Things are so exceedingly rare that flaws are simply part of the lavishly embellished package, relishing the magnificent improbability that any natural or manmade creation should ever exist to begin with in a world as preposterous as our own.

Poor Things is currently playing in theatres.